Taxes: The president may try to satisfy both environmentalists and pro-growth blocs by tying the shovel-ready project curiously left out of the State of the Union to just-introduced carbon-tax legislation.

Having failed to lower the sea levels in his first term, President Obama, in the first SOTU of his second term, highlighted the need for fighting climate change and proposed an Energy Security Trust Fund to siphon off money from those who actually produce abundant and useable energy to fund alternative energy sources which constitute a rounding error in the percent of energy produced by various sources.

Two days later, Senators Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., dutifully introduced carbon tax legislation to put the nail in the coffin of those fossil fuels President Obama blamed for causing Superstorm Sandy, droughts and floods, stopping just short of a plague of locusts.

"The leading scientists in the world who study climate change now tell us that their projections in the past were wrong; that, in fact, the crisis facing our planet is much more serious than they had previously believed," Sanders told a news conference in the Senate environment committee hearing room.

Well, except for noted climate experts like actress Daryl Hannah, arrested Wednesday in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL, we can't think of any that agree with Sanders.

Australia's leftist government recently enacted a “carbon tax”.The people are *outraged* by that law.Better no pipeline than this economy destroying tax.Just look at Europe...they have it and the Eurozone economy is on life support.

2
posted on 02/15/2013 3:48:23 PM PST
by Gay State Conservative
("Progressives" toss the word "racist" around like chimps toss their feces)

Once you assert successfully the power to license and control “carbon”, which is to say, the air you breathe, you have successfully asserted ownership and control of the entire economy and every living breathing person in the country.

He gives “permission” to build a pipeline with one hand and takes ownership of it and everything else in the same motion.

A carbon tax will further skew the production structure of American business. Every activity that emits carbon will be scrutinized for its necessity and will be eliminated or scaled back if possible.

The effects will be similar to what we've already witnessed with the new EPA regs on coal-burning powerplants. Many are just being shut down with no replacements planned.

A carbon tax will do the same -- just spread over the entire business spectrum thus making it harder to spot the damage. Small businesses and marginally-profitable enterprises will just shut down. Larger ones will shift production into areas with less carbon "exposure". People will lose jobs, markets will lose customers, and the economy will be further thinned out.

Some advocates for the tax will insist that business will just pass along the costs to consumers but that's not true. If they could raise prices without losing sales, they already would have.

A carbon tax is very dangerous. If Obama proposes it as the requirement to approve the pipeline, we must all say, no.

We can work around the lack of a pipeline; but we can't live with a carbon tax in any manner we've become accustomed to. It's line-in-the-sand time.

12
posted on 02/15/2013 4:20:33 PM PST
by BfloGuy
(Money, like chocolate on a hot oven, was melting in the pockets of the people.)

Carbon is the reason O is president. He is going to keep coming after this again and again until he gets it. If he fails, his puppeteers will find another puppet. They will never give up until they get it.

There are trillions of dollars to be made, laundered, invented out of thin air, and the political control this gives is absolute.

Guess what? Starting this May, if you live in the northern half of the country and have a new furnace installed in your house, it has to be something like 95% efficient. It will cost you a lot more than ones that are almost as efficient, and in older homes, it will require extensive alterations in the home to install it.

The tougher standards will apply only in the northern states, and it is still possible the EPA will back down. However, if you live up north and think you might need a new furnace soon, I would certainly keep an eye on the developments.

20
posted on 02/15/2013 6:08:58 PM PST
by Pining_4_TX
(All those who were appointed to eternal life believed. Acts 13:48)

"The leading scientists in the world who study climate change now tell us that their projections in the past were wrong; that, in fact, the crisis facing our planet is much more serious than they had previously believed,"

Yeah.....the only global warming is due to Galileo Galilei spinning in his grave....

The SUN IS ON STRIKE...not producing a good crop of sunspots as the sun's magnetic field declines to historic low values.

At best we have another 400 years long Mini Ice Age.

22
posted on 02/15/2013 7:35:08 PM PST
by spokeshave
(The only people better off today than 4 years ago are the Prisoners at Guantanamo.)

Our current cycle (cycle 24) has been relatively uneventful compared to the pastbut the prediction for Cycle 25 is scary. Indeed, it may not even happen on schedule. The news sources below explain in detail.

Spaceref.com:

A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest period even as it is acting up for the first time in years, according to scientists at the National Solar Observatory (NSO) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL).

As the current sunspot cycle, Cycle 24, begins to ramp up toward maximum, independent studies of the solar interior, visible surface, and the corona indicate that the next 11-year solar sunspot cycle, Cycle 25, will be greatly reduced or may not happen at all.

From Yahoo: Science Mag:

Things may be about to get very dull on the sun. Three different measurements of solar activity, reported by scientists at a press conference today, suggest that the next 11-year-long solar cycle will be far quieter than the current one. In fact, it may not happen at all: Sunspots, the enormous magnetic storms that erupt on the suns surface as the cycle builds, might disappear entirely for the first time in approximately 400 years.

24
posted on 02/15/2013 7:51:35 PM PST
by spokeshave
(The only people better off today than 4 years ago are the Prisoners at Guantanamo.)

In addition to this the price of oil will go down (as more oil is coming to the market), i.e. less dependence on Middle East, and less money to the present oil producing countries, incl. Saudi and Russia.

The current shale revolution at its current rate can turn the US into an energy superpower, according to Karen Moreau, executive director of the American Petroleum Institutes New York State Petroleum Council.

I'd refer you to the introductory section of the Geological Society of America's 1990s Treatise on North American geology, found in Volume X, (paraphrasing title here) "The Non-Glacial Quaternary Geology of North America". You're probably aware of what "Quaternary Geology" means, and the buildup of evidence that we have not yet ended the Pleistocene but are merely in another Interglacial.

Refer to paleotemperature proxy curves in the Introduction and correlate the temp curve data of the current Interglacial ("Holocene") since the end of the Lesser Dryas (about 9000-10,000 ybp), or the final, ultimate end of the Wisconsinian Glacial, to the paleotemp curves of earlier warm cycles.

Comparison of this paleotemp curve data with paleotemps available for the earlier interglacials shows that the general form of each interglacial is a cockscomb-like composite curve formed by convolution of multiple cyclicities superimposed on one another. The first-order curve would be (by my horseback reckoning) of eon length, the second-order would reflect the onset of full glacial conditions at the end of the Pliocene, the third would reflect the glaciations and their associated astronomical cyclicities (nutation, precession, etc.). The fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-order cyclicities that give the interglacials their cockscomb appearance are what we're talking about here.

But each interglacial paleotemp curve shares an overall pattern: the warmest part of the interglacial is earlier, and then temps gradually tail off with numerous subcycles (the Roman Warm Period, Medieval Warm, etc.) and convolved higher-frequency cyclicities until, eventually, they crash suddenly to full-pleniglacial ranges.

Eyeball-correlating our current interglacial with previous interglacials, we are about 600-1800 years from the end of the interglacial. That's the point.

Any "mini-Ice Age" similar to the Dalton Minimum of 250 years ago (roughly) would be a higher-order, shorter-wavelength excursion on a longer-wavelength interglacial temperature curve that is gradually tailing off anyway as we look forward to the dregs, the last "good years", of the current interglacial.

It appears, if the sunspot activity is any indication (and Danish and Russian astrophysicists and climatologists have been warning us for a few years about this reduction of solar output, even as Al Gore's fans went crazy imagining palm trees growing on Arctic shores), that our climate going forward is going to be very uncomfortable.

Iagree - we’re better off without the pipeline for now if enacting a carbon tax is part of the deal. Life is carbon-based - when do they start taxing us for being returned to the earth like they tax us for disposing of old tires?

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